Artisinal white noise
Shhhhhhhh
It’s the end of 2020 and your social media feeds are plastered in Spotify Wrapped screenshots. A brilliant feat of marketing, to turn an expression of identity into obligation, and then charge $10.99/month for the privilege of advertising it. Which is to say, if you don’t use Spotify, who are you? Are you?
Do you remember which identity you telegraphed that year? Were you feeling Good as Hell, or like a Bad Guy? Were you Fetch[ing] the Bolt Cutters, or keeping it Juicy? Not to brag, but mine was quieter, harder to describe, genre defying. You’ve probably never heard of it, a track titled “Shhhh Peaceful Shushing Mother’s Voice (Loopable)” by the artist Baby Shushing ft. Baby Sleep.
I was three months into the life of my first child, living many a parent’s worst nightmare of watching all the facets of their selfness become subsumed into parenthood. The baby was swaddled in a bassinet right beside our bed. The Sonos speaker played the track on a loop, and when that wasn’t enough, we frantically Googled “how loud can white noise be before it breaks tiny ears” and found a slew of SEO-optimized blogposts confronting the inadequacy of language to describe volume. The baby, frustratingly resistant to outsourced labor, seemed to react better to our own shushing, so we joined in on the chorus, half asleep.
It began to feel like I was part of a clonal colony of quaking aspen trees, ostensibly disparate but connected underground through a shared root system. Now I’m the baby. Now I’m the parent. Now, my parents, every parent who has ever lived. Now, the Sonos speaker. Now, Baby Shushing ft. Baby Sleep. A single exhaling organism, desperate and failing to lull and be lulled.
After one particularly sleepless night, I fired up GarageBand and layered a looped recording of myself shushing on top of a heartbeat on top of undulating white noise. I exported goodnightari.mp3, which was to work as a mirror self, staying awake and salving any sleeplessness. The world’s most absent, soothing DJ. For a time, it was enough.
In 2023, Bloomberg reported that Spotify was demonetizing white noise podcasts from its platform because they reduced its profits by as much as $38 million annually.
It’s interesting to think that, for a brief period between 2018 and 2023, we might have been living through a golden age for white noise that paralleled the golden age of symphonies. In the 18th century, a system of wealthy patrons bankrolled composers in Europe, and in the 21st, a corporate patron paid out as much as $18,000 a month to white noise podcast creators through algorithmic accident and opportunism. And here I was, unbeknownst to me, tapping into the zeitgeist with my homegrown, grass-fed, soporific beats.
It’s strange the lengths we’ll go for love, stranger still the lengths we’ll go to fall asleep.
This past month, Stability AI released Stable Audio 2.0, an improvement to its AI song generator. I gave Stable Audio 2.0 the prompt “looped recording of a parent making a shhhhhhh noise to calm a baby to sleep over the sounds of a heartbeat and white noise, calming track for falling asleep,” and it generated what can only be described as foley artist b-roll for a horror film:
These models are presumably trained and tested on songs. But one can imagine a future in which an AI could create a decent doppelganger of my hush. Would my child be able to tell the difference? Would you fault me for sleeping like a baby?
☣️ Algorithmic detritus
Side effects of a world driven by software logic
Jason Koebler on the uncanny valley that is post shrimp jesus Facebook: “I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.”
🏃 Escape attempts
Acts of algorithmic resistance
･ ･－･ ･－ ･･･ ･ －･･ is an artist on Spotify whose name and songs are virtually unsearchable. As Casey Newton posited: “a kind of anti-SEO rebellion against the moment? is this punk rock??”
Other orders is a set of algorithms for sorting text-based feeds, including alphabetically, by Kafkaesque-ness, and by “approximate quantity of shame expressed.”
Snail is Inevitable is a browser extension in which an invisible snail slowly chases your cursor, leading to your inevitable death.
🌸 Screenshot garden
Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context
